The President is Missing by James Patterson and Bill Clinton

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My review of James Patterson & Bill Clinton’s new thriller (Century) appears in today’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

The President is Missing: A Novel, says the cover. This is inaccurate in two senses. For one thing, the Presidential hero of The President is Missing doesn’t actually go missing (he does, as the parlance has it, “go rogue” for a while, but his Secret Service team knows exactly where he is at every second, which does spoil things a bit). And for another, The President is Missing is only a novel in the sense that it has chapters and sentences and dialogue and things like that. It’s actually just the sort of disposable flotsam you buy in the airport on your way to a beach holiday, like those miniature tubes of toothpaste or those inflatable pillows for the plane. Suntan lotion? Check! Gimmicky book? Check!

The Unique Selling Point of The President is Missing is that it promises to disclose (testify, O blurb!) “details only a President could know.” So, does our protagonist and narrator, manly war hero President Jonathan Lincoln Duncan, let us in on some juicy official secrets? Well, no, actually. Unless it thrills you to learn that the tunnel connecting the White House to the Treasury Building next door “was designed in a zigzag pattern precisely to mitigate the impact of a bomb strike,” you will come away from The President is Missing disappointed. Things you might actually want to know – like, what’s the protocol when the President needs the loo? Do Secret Service agents stand guard outside? – never crop up.